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Saturday, February 26, 2011

My Top 10 of 2010

There was a lot of fuss last year about how 2010 was shaping up to be a mediocre year in movies. throughout the year, I was in the minority in maintaining not only that I thought it was shaping up to be a great year for movies but that, indeed, I thought it was a better year than 2009. Mind you: it was an all-around bad year for politics, world affairs and my own issues with employment and education, but that's besides the point. 2010 offered plenty of fantastic titles--so many, in fact, that I often found myself constantly rearranging my top five. Movies would go in and out time and time again. On some days I would love a movie, on other days I would merely like it. It was a neverending cycle, but I always knew I was in good hands. Rarely did I ever feel like I was appreciating a movie only because I was being pressured by the majority to appreciate it, which happened to me a lot in 2009.

Anyway, here is the list (for your reading pleasure).

1. Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese)

At first I walked out of Shutter Island in awkward disappointment, thrown a bit for a loop by the ending. It took me a while to comprehend the fact that I had just sat through a Scorsese film, since it didn't leave me with the feeling I normally get from seeing his movies (certainly not from any of the theatrical ones he made in the last decade). But a revisiting of the film paid off, and I realized to my pleasure what Scorsese was actually doing: recycling one of his favorite themes, post-traumatic veterans' stress disorder, and giving it a film noir injection. My review here.

2. The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski)

Polanski's film cuts deep into contemporary subjects like torture and government corruption, but it's so much more than that, too. There are familiar Polanski elements that we may recall from some of his earlier films like Knife in the Water, Frantic and The Ninth Gate, but he's got something unique up his sleeve. My review here.

3. Another Year (Mike Leigh)

The first time I've ever witnessed a Mike Leigh film on the big screen, and hopefully one of many more. I admired the heck out of Leigh's last two features, 2004's Vera Drake and 2008's Happy-Go-Lucky, but nothing quite prepared me for this film--which left me in a long, ponderous silence after it was over. Has Leigh been building up to a film like this his entire career?

4. The Social Network (David Fincher)

Of all the movies nominated for Best Picture and Best Director, this is the best, and I'd like to see it win both. Fincher and Aaron Sorkin do complete justice to Ben Mezrich's excellent novel The Accidental Billionaires, and more: in Sorkin's own words, Fincher literally makes sequences of computer-hacking "look like bank robberies", which makes the film a visually sensational experience. Jesse Eisenberg, splendid as Mark Zuckerberg, has obviously grown as an actor since his nice performance as the alienated son in Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale (2005).

5. Chloe (Atom Egoyan)

I saw this last spring, and I was absolutely dumbfounded once I learned that there were only three people in the entire world who actually loved it: Roger Ebert, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and me. Egoyan's style is over-the-top, no doubt about it, but it's great to finally see Julianne Moore (who's never been better) and Liam Neeson playing a couple; and Amanda Seyfried is quite sexy as the callgirl who meddles in their whole family's business.

6. In A Better World (Susanne Bier)

Does this film count? I didn't actually get to see it until it premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival, in January 2011. And yet it's being nominated as a 2010 film at this year's Academy Awards. Therefore, I'll have to consider it a 2010 film, despite the fact that many won't get to see it until later this year. Bier's film is a shocking examination of bullying, masculinity and vengeance; the Swedish title is pronounced "Haevnen", which, contrary to initial assumption, actually means "revenge" in English. Note to the Academy: the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film belongs right here. I wrote about it last January.

7. Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich)

Is it as great as the first two films? Maybe, maybe not. It's obviously going to win Best Animated Film, but I'd like to see it net an extra Oscar for Randy Newman's catchy song, "We Belong Together." Anyway, I had a hell of a time--both times I saw it.

8. Green Zone (Paul Greengrass)

A lot of people despised this film and found the uber-liberal politics of Brian Helgeland's screenplay to be obnoxious. But hey, sue me: I got a visceral rush out of it, and I thought the extreme liberalism was a nice way of getting mass audiences to wake up and smell the coffee--this is the most successful "commercial" movie that Hollywood has ever released about the war in Iraq. And I agree with Ebert that it's also one hell of a thriller.

Emma Stone was radiant in that movie and she is no doubt going to be a splendid actress, but I found Easy A to be more disturbing than hilarious. I didn't find the subject matter to be particularly funny: it's basically about a girl who is degrading herself and pretending to prostitute herself, and--at least, in my opinion--that kind of material would have been more suited to an indie drama, rather than to a dumbed-down teenage comedy. It reminded me of Blue Car (2002), another movie about a teenage girl on the verge of sexual awakening who begins fantasizing about her English teacher. And compared to that film, Easy A felt so limited.

It had some funny moments here and there, though. The Tom Cruise gag was amusing. And Lisa Kudrow did surprisingly well with that small role.

Glad to see I'm not the only one who not put SHUTTER ISLAND up there in the Top Ten, but thought 2010 overall had some real gems. As always some excellent observations, and I look forward to your 2011 thoughts!